


Santorini

by ljs



Category: I Spy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-18
Updated: 2010-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:20:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A ficlet written to Heron Pose's request: Kelly and Scotty, disillusion, sand in shoes</p>
            </blockquote>





	Santorini

_Greece has turned its back on the sort of wine it gave to the rest of the world. I met perhaps the last traces of it on that other sea-girt volcano, Santorini, where scattered vines crouch from the scouring wind like birds' nests in the rock. The cellars, equipped with ancient barrels, were caves in the cliff face._  
\--A Life Uncorked, Hugh Johnson

  
When Kel decided to stage his running away, Scotty thinks, he picked a hell of a place. But then Kel always did like his lotus-eating.

Scotty eases his hand around his bottle of water – shipped in like everything else, because the islands didn't have their own source of fresh. Everything had to come from outside.

He waits for the sign he knows is coming.

Tourists begin to flock to this waterside taverna, chattering, waiting for the famous sunset, sky and sea merging into one shimmering mass of color. Scotty doesn't care much for sunsets. He's seen a lot of them, a lot of different taverns and a lot of different seas, usually with Kel--

Whose familiar voice lifts over the noise of the tourists, singing some jazzy song without words, approaching fast. Scotty listens carefully, hoping not to hear the drugs or wine of one of their last visits to the islands.

When Kelly drops into the other chair at the table, however, his eyes are clear, his smile wide and knowing -- spending his time on his other vices, then. "My man, you don't appear to be appreciating this _glorious_ scenery. Bit of color in your drab life, huh?"

"Speak for yourself, Mervyn," Scotty says with a rush of relief. It's been a long month, ferrying between Santorini and the mainland, flying back and forth between Washington and Athens, and every time he's been worried about what he'd find here. Major volcanoes have nothing on Kelly Robinson. “And, anyway, next time I say ' _go_ for yourself,' you just smack me in the face and stay put, okay?”

Kelly laughs. He looks pretty casual, Scotty thinks – fisherman's sweater and jeans against the evening chill, climbing shoes --

"Oh sweet Philly freedom," Scotty says, less relieved. “What's on the itinerary?”

Kelly lifts one hand, sends a smile over to the pretty waitress. “Glass of your best local white, Thea my pretty girl!” Then, to Scotty, in a voice all too well-known from past missions, “Hope you're ready for a little nighttime stroll, Stanley.”

Scotty looks down at his suit and tie, and sighs. He should have guessed.

Even before the sea and sky go all rose and orange, Kelly finishes his wine and leads them to a path down a...

"This is a _cliff_ , man," Scotty points out.

"Best way to the cellars!" Kel says with obnoxious cheer, and leaps down to a rock Scotty can barely see.

Muttering curses that would make his dear mother whap him with a very big stick, Scotty follows.

Sun's heat is already disappearing from the rocks, up into the darkening orange and rose. Scotty rips open his hand on a sharp outcropping he can't see. He feels the earth's cold seeping in, hears the ocean getting louder as they descend. He's got a rock or something in his city shoe.

Kelly leaps down, down, then stops before a particularly jagged rock. “And here's where the road ends, my friend."

Scotty reaches him – it's a natural landing in this natural staircase –and then sits on a convenient and thankfully less pointy stone. “Rock in my shoe,” he says as he bends down to unlace it. “So tell me what's in the cellar before we hither-and-yon onward.”

Kelly sits down beside him, almost crowding him into the mountainside. Ocean sounds like it's coming up through the rocks, so loud that someone would have to be right on top of them to overhear. “Not so much yon,” he says. “Ballantine said he'd put the microfilm here in Madame Atrios' wine-cavern before dark. Saw him heading this way when I hit the taverna.”

" _The_ microfilm?” Scotty's been passing along the double-agent's promises for weeks, and he can't quite believe good news when he hears it.

" _The_ microfilm.” Kelly's smile catches the last of the light. “Told you, Arnold,that a light touch--”

"Is that what the beautiful Madame Atrios called it?"

"--a light touch and a _pure heart_ can conquer the world. Or at least save one little bitty nuclear installation."

Scotty knows that despite the jokes, Kelly on some level believes exactly what he's saying. It's always Kel who idealizes, always Kel who feels the crack of those ideals falling like stones breaking on their way down the cliff-face.

Scotty grew up hard in Philadelphia. He's never had the same luxury, never quite the same pain.

But he sends the stone in his shoe off to join the million other volcanic pebbles on this Santorini shore, he laces up his brogue. He sets his shoulder to Kelly's, as he's done for the past four years. “Well, then, sir. Time to get some microfilm.”

The door of the wine-cellar is locked. Kelly uses an old key, too dull to gleam, and then the door soundlessly swings open on darkness.

"You bring a flashlight?" Scotty says, knowing better.

"No, man. I know where the lantern is, I have some matches...” Kelly trails off. He must smell what Scotty's smelling – not old wine and older barrels, not even cavern-cold. It's fresh, and it's horrible,and they both know what it is.

"Ah _hell_ ," Kelly says, and yeah, there's nothing but broken dreams in that hipster voice.

It's ten steps down and in. The body's at the bottom of the stairs, and when Kelly finds the lantern somehow in the black, when he lights the wick and holds up the glass, Scotty sees the blood.

"Diana," Kelly breathes, and he's about to go to his knees and cradle what used to be Madame Atrios, but Scotty's hand on his shoulder holds him fast.

"Kel. You can't."

"Scotty, brother...." It's heartbroken pleading.

"You can't." It's regretful command.

Kelly almost stumbles, almost falls, but then he sets himself against Scotty's shoulder, leaning in for balance. “Yeah.”

The fact that Ballantine's microfilm is taped to the bottom of the lantern as planned makes it all worse. What the hell was the death _for?_

Anyway, they'll have to take another path out– this is likely a set-up, and they're strangers in this land.

Even as Scotty pushes Kelly out into the salt-soaked fresh air, even as he's planning ways and means and escape routes, he looks out over the ocean. Sun's just down, the water deep and still crimson-touched.

One of his tutors at Oxford taught him that the nineteenth-century translations of Homer used “wine-dark sea” to connote not just color but blood. That's about right, he thinks, as he keeps Kel from pitching down the cliff in his grief.

Scotty doesn't much care for sunsets. He's seen a lot of them.


End file.
